Because everyone likes pictures.

After-Before Friday Week 18

Highlighting the creative magic behind post-processed photos

Many thanks to this week’s 7 participants (spiders and all)! If you wish to join in, guidelines are on the After-Before Friday Forum page.

My submission: The photo I’m showcasing this week is one I shot playing around with long exposures using my tripod. I used some black cutting boards for a makeshift background and then used Lightroom to complete the effect. It’s amazing the fun photos to be found around the house!

I took a shot of this book from a different perspective and processed it in black and white. Vote in a poll for which version you like better (as I just can’t seem to make up my mind!).

Robin says: Nearly always, my goal in post-processing is to create an image that is a close representation to what I was seeing when I was on the scene making the photograph. But every so often, I am tempted to create a scene the way I wished it had been. Such is the case with my submission to Stacy Fischer’s After-Before Forum this week. The “Before” image here shows the original RAW image of the Washington Monument in the late afternoon of early March 2013. An incredible shaft of golden sunlight was illuminating the monument as the dark clouds of a clearing storm moved toward the east. It would have been perfect had this occurred a few weeks earlier, before the scaffolding and fencing for the earthquake repair had started to go up. The “After” image shows the scene with the correct lighting on the monument and the correct darkness of the clouds, but the scaffolding and fencing has been radically changed—it is mostly gone. Details on the post-processing can be found at my post. As always, many thanks to Stacy for hosting this Forum.

Jaime says: This time I wanted to finish my last submitted work, from week 16, and just turned the same image into Black and White. Why B&W? Well, I think this would give a classic and more realistic aspect to the image than that, more fantastic or surreal, of the previous one. Otherwise, B&W version dissimulates (even more) an important detail more noticeable in the color one. What do you think? Are you able to notice it?!

Loré says: The post-processing was a nightmare, I just couldn’t get what I wanted. First I ran it through the GIMP, removing the leash and balancing the colours. Yellow was a particular b#%”$, it was so hard getting the right yellow for the flowers, without turning the entire image into a yellow mess. I really didn’t like the results I was getting. Then I went out for a walk, returned and discarded all the work, starting from the beginning. Same steps led to slightly better result, but it was still a bland image. I was running through all the tools in GIMP faster than Usein Bolt. I wanted to create the window with my Berta in the focus and everything else blurry. Finally, I ran the image through my good old friend PicMonkey (they should really pay me for the promotion) and played around, until I stumbled upon a solution. I sharpened the image almost to the maximum which gave me good results on the dog and the grass, but everything else was awful. Than I used “Focal Soften” which gave me the final result. Some will say – too much work, I say – you’re right. By the way, I flipped the image just so it would look cool in Stacy’s post.

Karen says: I’ve continued to explore post processing in Lightroom using tips from several Blogs in WordPress. One tip came from M.Funk Photography’s Blog in a tutorial video on “Retouch an Underexposed Sunrise.” He suggested making sure to balance luminance and sharpening so that they equal 100, along with several other tips. I was equally impressed with PhotographybyKent from After-Before Friday – Week 17 where not only was the final image stunning, but the visual tips that Robin provided were great. You can read more details about my post-processing here. Each week I learn more and more from the After-Before Friday posts in the Visual Venturing Forum.

Katie says: My image this week is one I took at a classic car rally last weekend. Using some simple editing techniques in Lightroom I wanted to add a bit of colour and contrast to this image of an old Mercury Monterey to try and replicate what I saw rather than what the camera flattened it out to! I think that I was going for a kind of “retro” feel to the image to match the old Americana type subject.

25 thoughts on “After-Before Friday Week 18”

Hi Stacey, another great blog – so much to learn, and some (at least for me) new blogs to explore and photographers to learn from, I feel a little like I have fallen off the track, and struggling to stay connected with people and for that matter my own blog!!!

Love what you did with this shot. Thanks for the heads up on the targeted adjustment tool, you’ve explained it really well in your video. You mentioned about setting white points, I’m going to have to look that up also, it sounds like its something basic that I should know about. Both (B&W and colour) images are really striking, but I prefer the colour image, I like the POV better and the red spine adds that little bit extra! 🙂

Glad to help, Katie (though admittedly I’m still learning about all that Lightroom has to offer!). Thanks for “voting;” though sadly it seems the red lovers are in the minority. Last I looked at the poll, it was 70% to 30% in favor of the B&W 🙂

Just giving you a good-natured hard time, Ben. If you send me close-up photos of the face of an insect, though, forewarn me in the subject line 😉 And glad to find a fellow lover of the red in the book.

Thank you so much for the video, Stacy! That is a lot of effort to put it out in video for us to learn. Video learning is effective, but it takes much time to make. I haven’t use some of the features as you are showing us. This really is helpful. I shall try to do a before and after next week. I’m excited…
Have a great weekend! 🙂

Glad you liked the video, Amy 🙂 I have been helped by many video tutorials, so I thought they would be a nice addition to the forum. And I’m happy you’re excited about the Forum! We’re excited to have you 😀

Great ABFForum week Stacy, congrats! And congrats to all the participants, good works!
You did a magical work with that book; I feel it like “Back to The Future”, from the romantic-classic- sepia tone of ancient-traditional-library books to the pure-postmodern-white of tablets digital books; excellent!